Exploration requires mobility. And whether you're on Earth or as far away as the Moon or Mars, you need good tires to get your vehicle from one place to another.
Tire development for space exploration has been a focus of research at NASA Glenn for a decade. Evolving since the days of Apollo, NASA engineers started examining tire designs back in the 1960's for use on the surface of the Moon.

The highly anticipated moment that all you FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) teams that submitted an application for a NASA FRC grant, has finally arrived! NASA's award selection is listed in the following link. If your FRC team submitted an application for a NASA FRC registration grant, please review the awards list to verify your award status.

In just a few years, NASA's next Mars rover mission will be flying to the Red Planet.
At a glance, it looks a lot like its predecessor, the Curiosity Mars rover. But there's no doubt it's a souped-up science machine: It has seven new instruments, redesigned wheels and more autonomy. A drill will capture rock cores, while a caching system with a miniature robotic arm will seal up these samples. Then, they'll be deposited on the Martian surface for possible pickup by a future mission.

Color-discerning capabilities that NASA's Curiosity rover has been using on Mars since 2012 are proving particularly helpful on a mountainside ridge the rover is now climbing.
These capabilities go beyond the thousands of full-color images Curiosity takes every year: The rover can look at Mars with special filters helpful for identifying some minerals, and also with a spectrometer that sorts light into thousands of wavelengths, extending beyond visible-light colors into infrared and ultraviolet. These observations aid decisions about where to drive and investigations of chosen targets.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity team is working to restore Curiosity's sample-drilling capability using new techniques. The latest development is a preparatory test on Mars.
The five-year-old mission is still several months from the soonest possible resumption of drilling into Martian rocks. Managers are enthusiastic about successful Earth-based tests of techniques to work around a mechanical problem that appeared late last year and suspended use of the rover's drill.

As you may have noticed there is now a Twitter feed on the right side of the Robotic Alliance Project's webpage! We would like to invite everyone to follow us on twitter and help spread the word about the Robotics Alliance Project and NASA! We plan on using Twitter to post about announcements, new features, and much more!

An unexpectedly strong blast from the Sun hit Mars this month, observed by NASA missions in orbit and on the surface.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/large-solar-storm-sparks-global-aurora-and-doubles-radiation-levels-on-the-martian-surface